Best Public Park St. Louis 2006 - Forest Park

In some instances more is more and bigger is better. Even if the forlorn and largely unused park parcel adjacent to the BJC hospital complex should be leased and lost forever, Forest Park would continue to radiate Best-ness with lovely, leafy authority via its miles of pedestrian and bicycle paths, its extraordinary cultural institutions, its broad and various fields and facilities for sport, its secluded redoubts, its visually thrilling vistas. The park  our park  is 1,293 acres big, and restored to a fare-thee-well after years of neglect. In a fashion as dynamic as it is democratic, Forest Park is a resource for just about anybody: those who fancy the arcane (such as the monument to physical culturist Friedrich Ludwig Jahn near Post-Dispatch Lake), and those who delight in the mundane (such as the musical and climatological assaults of the Muny). Forest Park, our treasure, is vitality defined, our region's heart, maybe its soul.